


Precision of Lunacy

by temporaltoxicologist



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal - Fandom, Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Gen, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2017-12-17 20:52:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temporaltoxicologist/pseuds/temporaltoxicologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It scared you the first few times. You’d wake up, naked and sweaty, sometimes on the floor of your room, sometimes on your porch, sometimes elsewhere; your feet caked in dirt and something dark underneath your fingernails. You learned fast to lock the doors, block them with furniture to limit the damage to only your own house. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it doesn’t matter.  It became something of a routine, and you wonder how many days you could take off work each month without arousing suspicion.<br/>The human ear in your sink, though. That was new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unfinished, hopefully more to come

It scared you the first few times. You’d wake up, naked and sweaty, sometimes on the floor of your room, sometimes on your porch, sometimes elsewhere; your feet caked in dirt and something dark underneath your fingernails. Vague memories floating like dust in your peripheries: you think of trees, the moon, full and loathsome. Sometimes animals, sometimes lights. Pain. Never how you got where you are, and never falling asleep. You learned fast to lock the doors, block them with furniture to limit the damage to only your own house. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. You always lock the dogs into their kennels; though you’ve never hurt them, of course, it seems even at your worst you wouldn’t lay a finger on them. But you’d rather not risk it, based on the poor forest animals you’ve dragged in (the worst were the ones that weren’t dead yet) and besides, you tend to leave the door open. You’re thankful that you have no neighbors.  
The next day (or couple) is usually spent taking cold showers, sleeping, and vomiting up pieces of things you’d have rather not thought about.  
Mostly bits of fur and tissue recalling unlucky squirrels and rabbits, and occasionally stray cats. Once or twice what looked like a piece of tire. It became something of a routine, and you wonder how many days you could take off work each month without arousing suspicion.  
The human ear in your sink, though. That was new.

You panicked. You fell to the floor, threw up until you dry heaved until you choked until you had to lay perfectly still until you felt everything rushing into you and the walls buckling in, and you must have been making some ungodly noise because you could hear the dogs barking.  
You also must have called him, because he is speaking as if through a wall, and very slowly putting his hands on your shoulders. You cannot make out what he is saying, but it is calm and measured. You swallow, close your eyes, count to ten, remember to breath, count backwards from ten and open your eyes and meet his. You think you can hear now. The dogs are not barking.  
You are suddenly very glad that you nor he had called the police.  
You are sitting on your porch, someone’s coat over your shoulders. The world is very grey and very bright and indistinct.  
He has gone into the house, having not bothered to ask if you were fit to accompany him. You try not to think of anything, and, failing, think of when you were turned, which you think of a lot.  
He reemerges from your house, sits down next to you on the porch.  
“Can you stand?”  
You nod in reply, and ask if he can let the dogs out of their kennels. Your legs feel heavy and numb, but you stand with him supporting you, and then on your own.  
“Whether she is dead or alive, it is likely that she is in one piece.”  
It takes a moment for you to process this. Who ‘she’ was referring to especially, as you’d done your best to dissociate from the reality that human ears are usually attached to humans.  
You ask what makes him say that, and he explains, calm and measured, that the ear was small and pierced once on the lobe, likely female, and that there would have been significantly more blood on your person or at least more regurgitated tissue if you had done any sort of dismembering.  
The word “dismembering” brings to mind a host of memories you’d rather not have thought of. Images of corpses laid out before you like a feast, a sort of presentation, segueing into vividly imaged sequences of the performance itself, so numerous they crowd into your head, and you have to breath. You doubt these are appropriate things for ones therapist to be saying in your current state.  
“Are you up for a walk?”


	2. Chapter 2

It is very easy to slip into the minds of animals. They afford a very limited range of emotional nuance and motivation: fear, hunger, boredom. A cursory examination can identify the wounds made by claws and teeth as opposed to hands and weapons, and the situation more than any empathy can tell why. A wolf doesn’t attack people out of malice, more likely it is trapped or frightened or, rarely, just hungry. And of course they wouldn’t seek out people, unless previously fed by them or incredibly desperate. As far as forensics goes, they are very simple. Techniques for matching animal form DNA to human form are fairly reliable, and wolves don’t usually try to cover their tracks. It’s prosecution that gets complicated: at best a charge for involuntary manslaughter, at worst for first-degree murder.   
You’d wondered why Jack Crawford would request you for a werewolf case. For a moment you felt paranoia, that this was a passive aggressive suspicion or an attempt on the part to out you or to get you to out yourself. But you calmed yourself down and told yourself that if that were the case (unlikely) you wouldn’t be helping yourself by confronting him or denying the case.  
So you went to the crime scene.   
So you saw why he requested you.  
It was at a cabin in the forest (they’re almost always forests, and almost never indoors). The wounds most definitely lupine, or possibly another large canine, but again, unlikely. Most were The body parts were incredibly organized in their distribution. The arms and legs detached but returned to their place beside the body. The chest cavity and stomach were ripped open, organs removed and placed neatly side by side on the kitchen table, intestines folded very intentionally, mostly undamaged, though the liver and heart were missing. The throat had been ripped out. The cabin looked as if it had not been lived in for several months, though it had indeed been lived in by the victim in question(white male, aged 30-35 later identified as James Hansen, a chiropractor and convicted sex offender). There was no other DNA to be found on the premises. No fur, no blood no tissue, no fingerprints.  
What you saw there was intention.   
What you saw there was determination and it was malice.  
What you saw there terrified you, on a level you had never felt at a crime scene. Somewhat out of revulsion, yes, but you had seen equally gorey, equally disgusting crimes many times before. It had been a long time since the sight of corpses sickened you. What shook you so, the fear that returned to you over and over, hung over you on quiet nights, was the intention. This was an animal crime committed maliciously and intentionally. This was a crime without fear or accident, a voluntary act of murder. And you were terrified that this could be what populated those nights, empty in your memory. Your hand, however changed, could determine such terrible things and it would be by your hand. Unknowing and unremembered. No poor neighborhood cats, but humans.  
But you understood why Jack Crawford wanted you here. And there he was at your elbow asking what you thought and you told him. You told him what he already knew, that it was different, that it was done with intent and with intelligence not to mention precision, not to mention skill. You told him that it’d likely kept the heart and liver as trophies. If it’d eaten them, it would have done so here and left a mess. You told him that it was nonhuman for all of the organ removal, which had happened immediately after the initial wounds, so there wouldn’t have been time for a transformation to occur. Also there were tiny marks on the lungs as by death, and patterns of blood as if something had been dragged across it.  
But they were human at some point in this place. Human enough to clean footprints out of the blood on the floor. And that whatever did this had likely killed before and would likely kill again.


End file.
